Compressing movie files

A bit confused as to what i should do. There is so many topics on the forum and when your not sure what you are doing they all seem to blend into one and get a bit messy. I have heaps of movies on my iMac which i watch via Apple TV2. Once i have watched them i want to remove...not delete...but remove either onto an external hard drive or compress a few movies and burn on a dvd. The dvd's i have a DVD-R 16x/4.7GB/120min. Which program would allow me to compress a few movies and then burn on a dvd. I have new external hard drive, never been used. If i start to transfer movies across to the external hard drive, will i still be able to access and play directly via apple tv2 or do i need to transfer back across to the iMac before i can watch again? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I wouldn't burn movies to DVD for storage anymore and I haven't since 2007. Since external HDDs are quite cheap nowadays (though the Thailand disaster has brought some price rises), you can always buy another HDD if the storage runs out.

I wouldn't burn movies to DVD for storage anymore and I haven't since 2007. Since external HDDs are quite cheap nowadays (though the Thailand disaster has brought some price rises), you can always buy another HDD if the storage runs out.

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-For my video business, I provide the customer with a copy of what I've video'd in dvd format. Question-What settings/how do the Hollywood producers use to fit a hi-def movie onto a single dvd? Do you know who I might ask directly? Do they have a different higher memory dvd than we can buy at the store or something? I don't like to hand a customer a dvd with degraded picture...

-For my video business, I provide the customer with a copy of what I've video'd in dvd format. Question-What settings/how do the Hollywood producers use to fit a hi-def movie onto a single dvd? Do you know who I might ask directly? Do they have a different higher memory dvd than we can buy at the store or something? I don't like to hand a customer a dvd with degraded picture...

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There are Single Layer (SL) DVDs with 4.7 GB capacity and Dual Layer (DL) DVDs with 8.5 GB capacity, the later are used for commercial video DVD distribution.

Depending on what you use to create video DVDs (DVD Studio Pro or Adobe Encore) you will get a handy compression tool (Compressor or Adobe Media Encoder), which has the right settings for the correct length and size of the DVD.
If you have a proper video editing software (which) you can either send the finished sequence to one of those applications or export it as QuickTime using the editing codec.

Outstanding - so helpful. This has been frustrating me for a year now.
Have been using FCE and iDVD but ready to upgrade to maybe Adobe Elements Pro or something. An aside, why in the heck is FCP still so expensive all these years later??). I get the feeling i should switch to Adobe Premier Elements Pro to create a new family of production software...
Thanks again for some sanity.

You mentioned that you would still like to watch your movies from your ext hd to apple tv without having them on your internal hd. If you set up your iTunes library on your external hd instead of your internal hd, you can watch any of your movies to apple tv. Another way to do that is to have vlc streamer and vlc help on your mac and vlc streamer on your iPad 2 and up or iPhone 4s or iPhone 5; turn on airplay and away you go; you will be able to watch movies from your ext hd.

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